The Monkey King Looks Pretty Insane

David Konow, 28th January 2014

Martial arts movies sometimes go in and out of vogue, but they never completely go away. It’s great when the genre can be reinvented in a new way, like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon did years ago, and we’re not sure if The Monkey King will be a game changer, but it certainly looks pretty wild.

This trailer is one of the craziest we’ve seen in some time, and we’re not exactly sure what this movie is about. Come to think of it, we’re not sure we can explain it even if we saw the whole thing, but visually we like the CG and the look of it, which is big for us because we’re not nuts about computer FX, but these sure look pretty wild.

In addition, we’re very curious to see how it’s going to look in 3D, which could turn out completely insane. Monkey King was four years in the making, and ccording to Twitch Film, the end result is “a hot mess.”

The Twitch review was definitely mixed, but that’s to be expected. The site called it “epic in scope,” yet the CG and 3D can be “both kaleidoscopic and abrasive to the senses.” As a monkey man, Donnie Yen apparently does a credible job, “not wholly successful,” but “he goes all out in a performance the likes of which we have never seen before.”

Twitch didn’t totally love the movie, but from our perspective we’re curious to see this thing, because it looks too wild to ignore.